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Comment by pif | Hacker News Reader

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-native_pronunciations_of_En...): Italians learning English have a tendency to pronounce words as they are spelled.

Being Italian myself, I can't help wondering: "If not for pronunciation, what else is spelling about?".

Just for the record, my first "shock" was with English, but learning French was more painful. Really, when you see a sentence written in French you do recognize its Latin origin. But, when you hear it... What went wrong during its evolution? At least, I was happy to discover that a major problem in learning French is common to several nationalities: there are several groups of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.

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Orthography is more about disseminating communication in an asynchronous way than pronunciation. Over time, it crystallises into something most people can agree on and use to communicate; however, in that time, it will pick up relics that are hard to get rid of. It is also true that while it reaches a relatively stable point, it still evolves slowly (e.g., in texts from about 100 years ago, you sometimes see "cooperate" spelled "coöperate"; in really old texts, you'll see the "long s", like in "highneſs").

The main point is that writing is a human invention, while language itself is thought by most to be a natural cognitive facility, similar to face recognition, that we've evolved to survive and flourish. When a spelling was coined for a particular word, chances are that it was relatively close to its pronunciation at the time, but oral language changes faster than written tradition.

> but oral language changes faster than written tradition

Yes and no! Sure, if they evolve at different speed, oral changes faster than written. But, in order to have any difference at all, you have to have accepted them to diverge at a certain moment in the past.

Luckily :-) this was never the case in Italy. Starting at least with Romans, written has always been meant as a phonetic transcription of the language. The pronunciation rules did change during time, but the underlying correspondence principle has never been given up.

As a native English speaker who learned French, I would have to say that pronouncing written French is easier than pronouncing written English. Indeed there are sounds that are very hard to distinguish ("en dessus" versus "en dessous"), but these sounds are a function of your native language. If you are a native Spanish speaker, the sounds you find difficult will be different than those for an English speaker. However, reading French amounts to pronouncing what is written on the page. Granted it is a far cry from Italian, which I've been told has no exceptions concerning pronunciation), but there are many fewer exceptions than English.

> "If not for pronunciation, what else is spelling about?"

Of course we should be able to read words more or less just by spelling out the letters according to simple rules.

In this regard "my" language is far better. We however have to deal with "word genders" (mostly arbitrarily assigned it seems for me) and other rules that makes little sense other than from an historical perspective.

> there are several groups of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.

Common problem : ) An immigrant arab who lived close to my place advertised a "water bomb" for sale in the local newspaper. It turned out to be a water pump. This was funny for us (many years ago) but the reason was obvious: he couldn't hear the difference between b and p.

> ...there are several groups of sounds which the non-francophones do not distinguish, while the francophones cannot understand how they may be confused with one another.

In linguistics, these are called allophones:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

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